Who doesn’t love finding a good shortcut? A year ago, G Suite created a handful of shortcuts: docs.new, sheets.new, and slides.new. You can easily pull up a new document, spreadsheet or presentation by typing those shortcuts into your address bar.
This inspired Google Registry to release the .new domain extension as a way for people to perform online actions in one quick step. And now any company or organization can register its own .new domain to help people get things done faster, too. Here are some of our favorite shortcuts that you can use:
OpenTable’s reservation.new, eBay’s sell.new and Github’s repo.new are also handy time-savers. Similar to .app, .page, and .dev, .new will be secure because all domains will be served over HTTPS connections. Through January 14, 2020, trademark owners can register their trademarked .new domains. Starting December 2, 2019, anyone can apply for a .new domain during the Limited Registration Period. If you’ve got an idea for a .new domain, you can learn more about our policies and how to register at whats.new.
With .new, you can help people take action faster. We hope to see .new shortcuts for all the things people frequently do online.
Have you built an Action for the Google Assistant and wondered how many people are using it? Or how many of your users are returning users? In this blog post, we will dive into 5 improvements that the Actions on Google Console team has made to give you more insight into how your Action is being used.
We've updated three areas of the Actions Console for readability: Active Users Chart, Date Range Selection, and Filter Options. With these new updates, you can now better customize the data to analyze the usage of your Actions.
The labels at the top of the Active Users chart now read Daily, Weekly and Monthly, instead of the previous 1 Day, 7 Days and 28 Days labels. We also improved the readability of the individual date labels at the bottom of the chart to be more clear. You’ll also notice a quick insight at the bottom of the chart that shows the unique number of users during this time period.
Previously, the date range selectors applied globally to all the charts. These selectors are now local to each chart, allowing you more control over how you view your data.
The date selector provides the following ranges:
Previously when you added a filter, it was applied to all the charts on the page. Now, the filters apply only to the chart you're viewing. We’ve also enhanced the filtering options available for the ‘Surface’ filter, such as mobile devices, smart speakers, and smart display.
Before:
After:
The filter feature also lets you show data breakdowns over different dimensions. By default, the chart shows a single consolidated line, a result of all the filters applied. You can now select the ‘Show breakdown by’ option to see how the components of that data contribute to the totals based on the dimension you selected.
A brand new addition to analytics is the introduction of a retention metrics chart to help you understand how well your action is retaining users. This chart shows you how many users you had in a week and how many returned each week for up to 5 weeks. The higher the percentage week after week, the better your retention.
When you hover over each cell in the chart, you can see the exact number of users who have returned for that week from the previous week.
To learn more about what each metric means, you can check out our documentation.
Try out these new improvements to see how your Actions are performing with your users. You can also check out our documentation to learn more. Let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions in terms of metrics that you need to improve your Action. Thanks for reading! To share your thoughts or questions, join us on Reddit at r/GoogleAssistantDev.
Follow @ActionsOnGoogle on Twitter for more of our team's updates, and tweet using #AoGDevs to share what you’re working on. Can’t wait to see what you build!
We’re excited to announce the official launch of the Google Maps Platform YouTube channel, a place for developers to learn and immerse themselves in the possibilities with maps.
We already have some great content on the channel about how to get started, incredible user stories, and the return of our Geocasts series coming soon - a series dedicated to providing walkthroughs and tips to help you learn how to implement Google Maps Platform features in your web and mobile apps.
Modes and toggles let you define the configurable attributes of your device that may exist outside the standard grammar for device control traits (such as On/Off or Start/Stop). This feature is often used to express device-specific settings, such as the "load size" for a clothes washer or the "cooking mode" for an oven.
When we initially introduced modes and toggles, we supported a whitelisted set of names and synonyms to ensure the most accurate responses and best user experience. Over time, we continued to add support based on the community's requests, but getting these requests approved has been a common pain point for many of you.
Starting today, you no longer have to get the names and synonyms provided in your SYNC response approved. The Google Assistant dynamically determines the necessary grammar for users to invoke these traits. If you're not already familiar with modes and toggles, here is an example using these traits to add support for custom cooking modes to an oven.
{ availableModes: [{ name: 'cook', name_values: [{ name_synonym: ['cook setting'], lang: 'en' }], settings: [{ setting_name: 'pizza', setting_values: [{ setting_synonym: ['pizza'], lang: 'en' }] }, { setting_name: 'pasta', setting_values: [{ setting_synonym: ['pasta'], lang: 'en' }] }] }], }
Example modes in SYNC response
Controlling a device using modes and toggles
We're excited to see what you build with these improved modes and toggles! For more details on using these features, see the updated guides for the Modes Trait and Toggles Trait. To share your thoughts or questions, join us on Reddit at r/GoogleAssistantDev.
Follow @ActionsOnGoogle on Twitter for more of our team's updates, and tweet using #AoGDevs to share what you’re working on.
Coral is already delivering impact across industries, and several of our partners are including Coral in products that require fast ML inferencing at the edge.
In healthcare, Care.ai is using Coral to build a device that enables hospitals and care centers to respond quickly to falls, prevent bed sores, improve patient care, and reduce costs. Virgo SVS is also using Coral as the basis of a polyp detection system that helps doctors improve the accuracy of endoscopies.
In a very different use case, Olea Edge employs Coral to help municipal water utilities accurately measure the amount of water used by their commercial customers. Their Meter Health Analytics solution uses local AI to reduce waste and predict equipment failure in industrial water meters.
Nexcom is using Coral to build gateways with local AI and provide a platform for next-gen, AI-enabled IoT applications. By moving AI processing to the gateway, existing sensor networks can stay in service without the need to add AI processing to each node.
Coral’s Dev Board is designed as an integrated prototyping solution for new product development. Under the heatsink is the detachable Coral SoM, which combines Google’s Edge TPU with the NXP IMX8M SoC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, memory, and storage. We’re happy to announce that you can now purchase the Coral SoM standalone. We’ve also created a baseboard developer guide to help integrate it into your own production design.
Our Coral USB Accelerator allows users with existing system designs to add local AI inferencing via USB 2/3. For production workloads, we now offer three new Accelerators that feature the Edge TPU and connect via PCIe interfaces: Mini PCIe, M.2 A+E key, and M.2 B+M key. You can easily integrate these Accelerators into new products or upgrade existing devices that have an available PCIe slot.
The new Coral products are available globally and for sale at Mouser; for large volume sales, contact our sales team. By the end of 2019, we'll continue to expand our distribution of the Coral Dev Board and SoM into new markets including: Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, India, Thailand, Singapore, Oman, Ghana and the Philippines.
We’ve also revamped the Coral site with better organization for our docs and tools, a set of success stories, and industry focused pages. All of it can be found at a new, easier to remember URL Coral.ai.
To help you get the most out of the hardware, we’re also publishing a new set of examples. The included models and code can provide solutions to the most common on-device ML problems, such as image classification, object detection, pose estimation, and keyword spotting.
For those looking for a more in-depth application—and a way to solve the eternal problem of squirrels plundering your bird feeder—the Smart Bird Feeder project shows you how to perform classification with a custom dataset on the Coral Dev board.
Finally, we’ll soon release a new version of the Mendel OS that updates the system to Debian Buster, and we're hard at work on more improvements to the Edge TPU compiler and runtime that will improve the model development workflow.
The official launch of Coral is, of course, just the beginning, and we’ll continue to evolve the platform. Please keep sending us feedback at coral-support@google.com.
DevFest season is always full of lively surprises with enchanting adventures right around the corner. Sometimes these adventures are big: attending a DevFest in the Caribbean, in the heart of the amazon jungle, or traveling more than 3,000 meters above sea level to discover the beautiful South American highlands. Other times they are small but precious: unlocking a new way of thinking that completely shifts how you code.
October marks the beginning of our DevFest 2019 season in Latin America, where all of these experiences become a reality thanks to the efforts of our communities.
What makes DevFests in LATAM different? Our community is free spirited, eager to explore the natural landscapes we call home, proud of our deep cultural diversity, and energized by our big cities. At the same time, we are connected to the tranquil spirit of our small towns. This year, we hope to reflect this way of life through our 55 official Latin America DevFests.
During the season, Latin America will open its doors to Google Developer Experts, Women Techmakers, Googlers, and other renowned speakers, to exchange ideas on Google products such as Android, TensorFlow, Flutter, Google Cloud Platform. Activities include, hackathons, codelabs and training sessions. This season, we will be joined by Googlers Grant Timmerman and Mete Atamel.
Grant is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google where he works on Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and other serverless technologies on Google Cloud Platform. He loves open source, Node, and plays the alto saxophone in his spare time. During his time in Latin America, he'll be discussing all things serverless at DevFests and Cloud Summits in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico.
Mete is a Developer Advocate based in London. He focuses on helping developers with Google Cloud. At DevFest Sul in Floripa and other conferences and meetups throughout Brazil in October, he’ll be talking about serverless containers using Knative and Cloud Run. He first visited the region back in 2017 when he visited Sao Paulo
Afterwards, he went to Rio de Janeiro and immediately fell in love with the city, its friendly people and its positive vibe. Since then, he spoke at a number of conferences and meetups in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and always has been impressed with the eagerness of people to learn more.
This year we will be visiting new countries such as Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Honduras, Venezuela and Ecuador that have created their first GDG (Google Developer Group) communities. Most of these new communities are celebrating their first DevFest! We'll also be hosting diversity and inclusion events, so keep an eye out for more details!
We thank everyone for being a part of DevFest and our community.
We hope you join us!
#DevFest
#DevFestLATAM
Find a DevFest near you at g.co/dev/fest/sa
If you wanted to send a secret message by mail, would you rather send it in an envelope, or on a postcard? If you send it on a postcard, anyone who saw the postcard on its way to the recipient could read the message, or even make changes to what’s written.
Encryption on a website functions like an envelope, protecting information passed between your website and its visitors so it can’t be snooped on or changed. It’s what keeps your visitors safe from bad actors who may try to alter your site’s content, misdirect traffic, spy on open Wi-Fi networks, and inject malware or tracking. You achieve encryption on a website by installing an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. This certificate ensures that the data passed between a web server and a browser remains private.
To kick off National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we’re highlighting something that many website owners don’t realize—a single page that isn’t encrypted could potentially be used to gain access to the rest of the website. To avoid this, you need encryption on your entire website, not just for pages that are collecting credit card numbers or log-in info. Even unencrypted landing pages that redirect to an HTTPS page can pose risks. A single unprotected page can become a backdoor for bad actors to snoop on the rest of the site. How do you ensure your entire website is encrypted?
Use a top-level domain that is HSTS preloaded.
The HSTS preload list tells modern browsers which websites to only load over an encrypted connection. The fastest way to get on this list is to use a top-level domain that’s already on the HSTS preload list, such as .app, .dev, or .page. Any website on those extensions gets the security benefits of HSTS preloading from day one, so all you need to do is install your SSL certificate.
Add your website to the HSTS preload list yourself.
Websites can be individually added to the HSTS preload list by the website owner at hstspreload.org. Keep in mind this can be a slow process because the list is manually built into the browser. That means updates to the list are made as new browser releases come out, which can take months to occur for all browsers.
More people are creating websites than ever before, with 48 percent of the U.S. population planning to create one. To help make building your secure website a bit easier, we’ve teamed up with some of our registrar partners, who are offering a discount on .dev, .app, and .page domains plus free SSL certificates during the month of October. We’re also kicking off a video series where existing creators will share their tips for launching a website. You can check them out at safe.page/buildsecurely.
Stephanie Duchesneau, Domains Security Expert, explains the importance of website encryption and the benefits of HSTS-preloading.
